Parenting in the time of video games is a very strange thing. The predictable effect is that you have far less time for gaming than you did before there were squirming and squealing half-copies of yourself roaming your living space. We all make sacrifices (RIP Civilization series), but they’re worth it. The less predictable outcome is how parenting bends your brain to not only select your games in a way that lets you share the experiences you enjoy with your new loved ones, but also how you perceive the games you play when they’re in bed. Much has been made of how media about children will make you cry after becoming a parent, but video games are often left out of that conversation. My daughter loves her little elephant stuffy, so I had a visceral reaction to hearing about one such stuffed animal getting dismembered in a recent “family friendly” video game. I’ve developed more of a distaste for Sword Guy or Gun Guy games as well, leading me to a lot more indie titles than I was interested in a few years ago.

Despite the gradual warping of my brain that I just described, I became interested in Scorn as its release date approached. Scorn is a video game that was announced an eon ago, resurfaced in 2020 with a dripping wall penis video, and then finally came out this past October. It’s been a pretty polarizing game, as reviews on this very website and in our Game Pass Game Club in the forums can attest. For my part, I enjoyed the game, and I was tempted to write my own review about it. But the timing of its release and my experience with it combined with the premature birth of my second child changed the entire nature of what I wanted to write, and it’s been just about the most surreal gaming experience of my life.

Here’s a quick summary of the game:

It’s a disgusting, intriguing, and sometimes frustrating experience. Under normal circumstances, I would be writing about its themes, how the artwork never fully justifies its source materials and/or inspirations, and how I ended up coming around the combat enough to label it one of the game’s positive features. Alas, these are not normal times.

My son was due on American Thanksgiving, though neither me nor my wife (go ahead, get it out of your system) expected him to wait that long. Our first child was born 3 weeks early, so we crafted our plans for a similar delivery date. Naturally, the new kid preempted that by an additional 2 weeks, meaning he was born the Monday after Scorn’s release. Mere hours into my son’s life, I walked out of the NICU and slept in a different part of the hospital, in the same room as my exhausted wife. Throughout the next day, there was a pervasive sense of wrongness; I could visit my son occasionally, but then I couldn’t do shit for him. He was still learning how to breathe, how to eat, and how to just… exist, and all of that needs the assistance of medical professionals instead of an extremely worried dad. Less than 24 hours into his life, I had to leave the hospital to take care of my 3 year old. So what did I do after putting her to bed and texting my wife for updates on the newborn? Play Scorn.

By far the most striking early-game imagery is the various ways the player-character peels themselves out of or disconnects themselves from items in the world. This is clearly meant to evoke birthing, which was obviously on my mind, but it hit differently as I thought about my son still hooked up to various tubes miles away from me. At that time, he was being fed via tube routed through his nose directly into his stomach (a process I’ve since learned is called “gavage”), and he had cords hooked up to monitor his heart rate and oxygen (4 in all). On top of that, he needed oxygen tubes lightly jammed into his nostrils. Any interaction I had with him in the first week involved gently maneuvering past a tangled mess of these items, each of which performed some vital task towards keeping him alive and healthy. It’s a careful dance to take a small human out of a crib, avoid all potential snags, then sit down in a chair to feed / snuggle the newborn.

Scorn has a few sequences that focus on the protagonist handling a helpless creature. As observed in the Unfinished, your reward for solving an early puzzle is a mass of flesh, most of which is fused with a humanlike creature. It pleads with its eyes and grasps weakly at your character, and the silent protagonist plods along from station to station. The suffering of this creature is strongly felt through wordless, muffled screaming. There are a couple of choices you have, one of which involves sawing the poor thing apart and collecting its arm. The other removes it from its flesh lump, but then you force its hands into a painful mechanism that allows them to assist you in opening a door. Then, cruelly, you abandon the creature in a locked chamber. Considering it was now a nightly ritual to say good night to my son, struggling to learn basic human physiological functions, you might think this sequence broke me. But it was such an on-the-nose interpretation of the intrusive thoughts I was having at the time that I barely reacted at all.

After a week or so in the highest level of the NICU, my son was transferred over to a lower-level NICU. I don’t remember the exact designations, but the upshot is he was doing well. We had the usual newborn concerns with jaundice, monitoring his weight like a hawk, and making sure he didn’t desaturate on oxygen. On top of that, the doctors needed to monitor his skull plates (since his fontanelle, aka head hole, was way too small) and found a little dimple at the bottom of his spine. Being a parent, particularly a parent of a preemie, is being told about things that you didn’t know could go wrong with a body, then being informed that the solution for many of those is “wait and see”. Logically, everything they tell you makes sense, and the people informing you are the best people you know to handle it. Emotionally, it’s exhausting to learn about a potential problem and not be able to take any actions toward resolving it. It didn’t help that it felt like every time one of these issues was resolved or at least looked like it was heading for resolution, a brand new one would pop up.

One night after 10 PM, I had finished either supervising a gavage feeding or feeding the baby myself, and I decided to stick around to spend more time with him. As I snuggled him, his respiratory rate on the monitor slowly dipped all the way down, eventually hitting 0. The machine started making a noise, and I called for help. My son’s breathing did return, and things all read normally except the flashing red word “apnea”. After setting him down in the crib, I finally tracked down a nurse and frantically explained the situation. I tried not to let any anger or frustration about the lack of response seep in, but I’m sure I was at least somewhat of an asshole (I apologized later that evening, just in case). The verdict was that my son was fine, as his other vitals hadn’t dipped to worrisome levels. After that, it became hard to trust a lot of the equipment. It seemed like false reports happened fairly frequently, and the staff had learned to ignore several indicators that tied up valuable nurses for no actual issue. But that was all my poisoned little brain needed to invent scenarios where a real issue just looked like a false report. The lack of control was never more readily apparent, and there was still no real timetable for my son coming home.

Progress in Scorn is mostly marked by checking out a weird new flesh biome after some transportation sequence. The final area is littered with phallic imagery, people strung up into a collective nervous system, and (as VB and Chip said in their stream) literal “load-bearing” statues. The bulk of your work here is filling up some canisters with goo, which you obtain from monstrous baby-sized creatures. On three separate occasions, you grab an egg from a pedestal, insert it into some golem-like creature, and then pop the egg to remove the monster baby. Afterwards, you gently transport it into a wall-mounted fixture that smashes the baby in a grotesque manner. You might think I, as a parent, would be thoroughly disgusted or shaken by this scene. But it was oddly affirming to me, as I spent several hours per day inside a facility where there was constant care and concern paid towards premature babies. Affection in reality was standing in sharp contrast to the nihilism of Scorn. Just as I lost my immersion in the video game that’s 90% vibes, I gained appreciation for my situation. My son was alive, healthy, and certainly not in the constant danger it sometimes felt like.

By the time I reached the end of Scorn, we were tracking our son’s progress by his feedings. There was a chart full of boxes near his crib, one that tracked the rate of bottle feeds he would get per day as well as the number of successes he needed to move on to more frequent bottles. My brain immediately gamified this chart and treated it as a hard tracker for my son’s homecoming. This was, as you might have guessed, not how the NICU treated it. It was more of a loose guideline to the staff, and we found that some days did nothing to bring him closer to home, while others jumped an entire row. One day, the nurses casually dropped that “maybe” they would discharge the baby soon. The following day, I got a text from my wife that “soon” meant “as soon as you get here with the car seat”. Out of nowhere, the NICU stay was over. It’s definitely a happy ending, and it’s very on brand with the whole situation that it happened outside of the plans we made for it.

It’s weird to reach the end of a video game and come to the conclusion of “oh yeah, this is a video game” right before its ending. But honestly, playing Scorn felt like walking through some interpretative art museum up until that point. The game unexpectedly spoke to me in its own strange language for a long time, and then it suddenly fell silent. We don’t choose the media that resonates with us in weird times in our lives, and we certainly don’t have any say over the ways they resonate with us. When my daughter was born, I was finishing up Tetris Effect, and the song in the final level (“Metamorphosis”) hit me like a ton of bricks. Everyone can recall certain songs or albums that mark their own transition points, and sometimes the memories you associate make absolutely no sense. Scorn being tied to the birth of my son is one of those experiences that defies explanation, and I will never forget it.

Postscript: I wrote the bulk of this a couple weeks ago. Since then, this kid has gained more than half of a pound each week and is eating too damn much. Thanks, Scorn?